SNR-Gated LSTM-Conditioned Diffusion Model for MIMO Channel Estimation

Abstract

Accurate and low latency channel estimation is critical for modern MIMO systems, particularly under mobility, where channels exhibit structured sparsity and strong temporal correlation. This paper proposes a time-series conditioned diffusion framework for channel estimation that performs denoising in the angular domain. Starting from least squares (LS) observations, we train a diffusion denoiser whose conditioning information is encoded by a long short-term memory (LSTM) network over a short observation sequence, enabling the model to exploit temporal dynamics beyond per-snapshot estimation. To robustly balance observation fidelity and learned generative priors across a wide signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) range, we introduce a learnable SNR-gated late-fusion shortcut that injects the network input into the final decoding stage through a sigmoid gate with trainable center and scale. To reduce inference latency, we adopt deterministic denoising diffusion implicit model (DDIM) style reverse updates with SNR-adaptive truncation and step allocation, which significantly reduces the number of reverse diffusion steps at high SNR while maintaining strong performance in low SNR regimes. Simulations on time-evolving standardized channel models demonstrate that the proposed method achieves consistent performance gains over existing diffusion-based channel estimation baselines, while retaining low latency through SNR-adaptive inference.

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